Desert Storm and Its Meaning; The View from Moscow
Abstract
The 1991 Persian Gulf war is proving to be a fertile source of insight not only for the American military establishment, but also for present and potential allies of the United States around the world. This insight is broad-ranging and involves such considerations as joint planning, technology application, coalition management, training and tactics, and changing patterns in the relative importance of the many combat and combat-support functions performed by the services. This report assesses how Russian defense experts have thus far perceived and drawn policy-useful conclusions from Operation Desert Storm. Although it is commonly observed that losers tend to profit more than winners by the way of lessons learned from such experiences, that observation does not strictly apply to the former USSR, since the Soviet government supported the coalition throughout the Gulf crisis despite the fact that Iraq had been one of its principal arms recipients. All the same, the Soviet defense establishment was more than passingly interested in the combat performance of both sides, and its successor institutions continue to exert major efforts to comprehend the war's course and outcome.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 1992
- Accession Number
- ADA260946
Entities
People
- Benjamin S. Lambeth
Organizations
- RAND Corporation